EarthView team bios, guidelines, and more.

Friday, June 13, 2014

Bridgewater Middle School, June 13

41° 59' 21" N
70° 59' 06" W


EarthView is not traveling very far today. In fact, it may be fun to compare the coordinates of today's visit at Bridgewater Middle School with those of EarthView's storage spot at BSU:

41° 59' 17" N
70° 58' 14" W

Which is farther from the equator? Which is farther from the Prime Meridian? Notice that for both locations, both coordinates include 58 or 59 as the measure of minutes. Just as 59 minutes is close to the next hour on a clock, 59 minutes is close to the next degree on the globe. Since both the latitude and longitude are close, this means that both locations are very near a degree confluence, which is what one geographic project calls such locations throughout the world, where the latitude and the longitude are in whole degrees. There is only one such point on land in Massachusetts, with another found in Cape Cod Bay.

The town of Bridgewater has an interesting place in the historical geography of the United States, as it was one of the first examples of western expansion as part of a process eventually associated with Manifest Destiny -- the idea that God had ordained the United States to occupy lands from the Atlantic all the way to the Pacific. The idea was nearly so grandiose in 1649, when Myles Standish met with the Wampanoag chief Massasoit at Sachem Rock to acquire what would eventually be Bridgewater and several other towns. The Plymouth colony had grown beyond its capacity to be sustained near the coast, and therefore expanded westward. The process is described in this fun -- and geographic -- installment of Schoolhouse Rock:


Dr. Hayes-Bohanan's article North Bridgewater -- a.k.a. Brockton provides more details about the origins of the Bridgewaters. It is part of a life-long blogging endeavor he is pursuing with Pamela Hayes-Bohanan, who is a university librarian and a trustee of the Bridgewater Public Library. The blog documents explorations of places all over the United States with the name Bridgewater, and includes a few special items, such as a review of the recent documentary film The Bridgewater Triangle.

Our visit occurs on a Friday the 13th with a full moon, known as a Honey Moon. This is an unusual coincidence that can be expected to occur about once every twenty years. EarthView team member Dr. Hayes-Bohanan's parents actually eloped on a Friday the 13th, but the moon was not full on that July 1962 evening.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Our Lady's Academy, Waltham -- June 11

42° 24' 35" N
71° 13' 47" W


The EarthView team enjoyed a brief visit to Our Lady's Academy on Wednesday morning, and got to meet all of the school's youngest students. We like the name OLA because it sounds like a friendly greeting in Spanish -- ¡hola!

Picture-within-picture: Mr. DeCoste poses with his sixth graders after a great time inside the world! They wanted to pose in front of North America, which was made possible as EarthView deflated. 

Friday, June 6, 2014

The Silk Internet

The word globalization refers to the ever-increasing connections among places that has resulted from increasing trade and communication. Technologies including containerized transportation and the internet have certainly increased the speed and complexity of global connections.
The fabric that brought worlds together.
As impressive as these technologies are, however, they did not begin the process of globalization. The Silk Road is a five-minute video from TED-Ed that explains how globalization was developing in Asia twenty centuries ago!



More recently and closer to home, the telegraph was an important way of connecting the world in the 1800s. It has been described as the Victorian Internet in a book by Tom Standage, who described the geography of telegraphs in an interview on All Things Considered.

Tantasqua Regional Jr. High School, Fiskdale -- June 6th

42° 09' 24" N
72° 07' 44" W


Tantasqua Junior High School




Today, Earth View returns to Tantasqua Regional Junior High School in  Fiskdale, MA. Last month the students of this school finished taking their yearly MCAS tests and are ready to explore the world with some EarthView fun!

To learn more about this school and its upcoming events, feel free to visit the Tantasqua website.

Each year the Tantasqua visit is a special one for EarthView, because it is the school where the Globe Lady became a geography teacher! She started there as a French teacher (her native language is French) but in the 1980s attended a special summer institute at National Geographic, and began her transformation into the fabulous and fabled geography educator we now know and love!

Because the Tantasqua students have been studying Latin America recently, the Globe Lady is rocking her Chichen Itza, Maravilla del Mundo (Marvel of the World) shirt and hat today, and discussing the exploits of EarthView team members in Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua and Brazil.

D-Day, World War 2, the invasion of Normandy, France.
Our June 6 visit takes place on the 70th anniversary of D-Day, also known as the Normandy Invasion. Over 160,000 troops from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and France itself assembled off
 the coast of Normandy overnight and landed on several beaches, including the famous one known as Omaha.  The landing made way for

Map courtesy of Blue Ox.

Other June 6 anniversaries:

1971- The Soyuz 11 was launched into space and docked at Salyut orbital space station the next day.
1978- "20/20" TV premiere date.
This is also Memorial Day in Korea, where the nation pays tribute to the fallen soldiers with a ceremony held at the National Cemetery in Seoul.


The Soyuz 11 From the USSR  was launched into space and docked at Salyut orbital space station the next day.
National Cemetery in Seoul.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

AP Geography, Cincinnati -- June 4 & 5

39° 05' 53" N
84° 30' 17" W
Learn more about Lat/Long (including how to look them up by address)
Also, compare today's coordinates to those of other recent EarthView outings, near and far!
 It is far west of any of its Massachusetts appearances, for example, but how does it compare to its appearance in Matagalpa, Nicaragua?


EarthView is returning to its roots in the Midwest -- where it was originally made and operated under different names -- on June 4 and 5. It is in Cincinnati as a special event for the educators who are meeting to read ALL of the AP Human Geography exams for the 2014 season. This is an excellent opportunity for geographers from across the United States to be energized by the EarthView experience.

Note: Massachusetts educators interested in the AP Geography program should feel free to contact the EarthView team, which has had substantial involvement in the program.

June 4 is an especially important anniversary in modern political geography. Twenty-five years ago today Lech Walesa was elected president of Poland in the first election in a former Soviet-bloc country on the very same day as the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China.